Empirical Inference

Effects of Stimulus Type and of Error-Correcting Code Design on BCI Speller Performance

2009

Conference Paper

ei


From an information-theoretic perspective, a noisy transmission system such as a visual Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) speller could benefit from the use of errorcorrecting codes. However, optimizing the code solely according to the maximal minimum-Hamming-distance criterion tends to lead to an overall increase in target frequency of target stimuli, and hence a significantly reduced average target-to-target interval (TTI), leading to difficulties in classifying the individual event-related potentials (ERPs) due to overlap and refractory effects. Clearly any change to the stimulus setup must also respect the possible psychophysiological consequences. Here we report new EEG data from experiments in which we explore stimulus types and codebooks in a within-subject design, finding an interaction between the two factors. Our data demonstrate that the traditional, rowcolumn code has particular spatial properties that lead to better performance than one would expect from its TTIs and Hamming-distances alone, but nonetheless error-correcting codes can improve performance provided the right stimulus type is used.

Author(s): Hill, J. and Farquhar, J. and Martens, SMM. and Biessmann, F. and Schölkopf, B.
Book Title: Advances in neural information processing systems 21
Journal: Advances in neural information processing systems 21 : 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2008
Pages: 665-672
Year: 2009
Month: June
Day: 0
Editors: D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou
Publisher: Curran

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2008)
Event Place: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Address: Red Hook, NY, USA
Digital: 0
ISBN: 978-1-605-60949-2
Language: en
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik

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BibTex

@inproceedings{5433,
  title = {Effects of Stimulus Type and of Error-Correcting Code Design on BCI Speller Performance},
  author = {Hill, J. and Farquhar, J. and Martens, SMM. and Biessmann, F. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B.},
  journal = {Advances in neural information processing systems 21 : 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2008},
  booktitle = {Advances in neural information processing systems 21},
  pages = {665-672},
  editors = {D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou},
  publisher = {Curran},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  address = {Red Hook, NY, USA},
  month = jun,
  year = {2009},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {6}
}